Part 1 - Modelling

Ok, I'm going to describe a little about the modelling of this scene. Before I begin, let me say that I applied displacement maps to almost every object in this scene, appearing that actual modelling is more complicated. It isn't! I'm a big fan of the phrase "It doesn't have to be right, it just have to look right!" This means, among other things, that you don't actually need to model everything, texture everything, blablabla... Beyond this area, the arcs are incomplete, the walls don't have chamfers, etc. So I only concentrate in what is seen. Of course you should not forget to model and texture elements that make shadow or appear in reflections, even if they're not visible directly...that happens a lot.

The arches are lofts consisting of an arch path and a rectangle spline. I modeled with loft because it allows textures to flow through its surface.

Path, shape and resulting arch

The metal plates were simple planes that i poly-edited to get a bumping shape. Then i added shell modifier which adds a little thickness:

Metal plate model

The paint bucket was a simple lathe object with a renderable spline as the wire. The cover is a cylinder with some cap segments edited to have a bent form:

Paint bucket model

That's about all the modelling in this scene. Very very simple. Let's get into texture work

Ok, texturing this scene was a lot different from the "clean" one, as you can see:) I had a lot of fun doing it, as I believe it came out cool!
Texturing isn't one of my strong points in 3D work, and I got this as a chance to evolve a little bit. Basically, I used two techniques for texturing the whole lot. For one, I tried to use masks and composite materials and maps inside 3dsmax. This worked well for some objects like the arches, where I simply rotated some maps to give randomness: